Panther

When Prism gave me the coordinates, she didn't explain. She never does. Just a few words I couldn't decipher—less a direction, more a riddle wrapped in intent.

I came ready for a fight. Something brutal. A hostile world that makes you fight for survival. A trial that leaves scars and demands answers. But EOS Prime…wasn't that kind of place. It met me with silence. With life unshaped by conquest. And for the first time since waking on the edge of the Galaxy, I didn't know what I was supposed to do.

EOS was alive in ways I'd never seen. Vast evergreen valleys soaked in starlight. Rivers coiling in silent spirals. Hills and skies locked in perfect equilibrium. Forests breathing with the wind.

No signs of civilization. No towers. No guards. No tech. No circuitry beneath my feet. At first, it felt primitive, but then I saw the trees bend to catch landing birds. Vines shifting—not randomly, but deliberately. I'd spent my life in cities that forced nature into submission but here, nature had learned to thrive on its own terms. It wasn't wild. It was intelligent. Beautiful, yet unnerving. Because nothing stays this untouched in our universe. Not unless something is keeping it that way.

I don't remember when I first sensed it. Humanoid in form, but far beyond anything I could define. Tall, lithe. It looked like a predator but didn't move like one. Its steps barely touched the earth. Reality bent gently around it. Water rerouted and trees shifted their canopies in a graceful bow. I watched quietly from the treeline, maybe fifty feet away. My heart pounded as its skin pulsed with bioluminescent patterns. Harmony wrapped in muscle and motion—that’s what it looked like to me. A being so intertwined with its world it could shape it without effort.

And then it stopped. It slowly tilted its head like it could sense somebody was watching. Our eyes met in a penetrating gaze. Wild, intelligent, and still. I was ready to run back to my ship, but deep down I knew running didn't make much sense. Luckily, to my surprise, Panther didn’t attack. I was clearly an intruder here, but it didn't treat me like one. It let me watch, observe. For some reason, the more it looked at me the more it felt like it had been expecting me here all along.

It's now or never, I thought. I came here for a reason. Time to get some answers. I slowly climbed out of the bushes and started walking but the space between us rippled—like heat rising off a desert road. Only this was cold. Sharp. My vision blurred and split —Panther appeared to shift across multiple positions at once. A glitch? A defense mechanism? I took a step back, and it snapped back into focus. I tried to step forward again, but the world seemed to reject it. The ground beneath me shifted enough to throw me off balance. Just as I steadied myself, Panther turned. For a heartbeat, its gaze caught mine again—and everything around it blurred, as if the world itself couldn't quite keep up.

Then I felt it. A pulse passed through the ground, the air, even the light around me. Like EOS itself was breathing through Panther. It resonated through my chest, into my bones, echoing with memories I hadn't made. Like Panther had seen everything I was… and everything I might become. A truth too vast to hold. I staggered, caught between wonder and fear. And then—The light bent. The wind curled inward. Reality folded around it like a ripple closing on still water. And Panther was gone.

The space it had occupied felt oddly empty. But I knew better. The air still carried its weight. Had it truly left, or just slipped into wherever truths wait when you're not ready to understand them? I still had questions, so I wandered, waited, and searched for a glimpse of a blur, hoping something would shift. Sadly, EOS had nothing more to show me. Not because I wasn't welcome but because I wasn't ready. At this point, I understood it was time to go back.

When I left, I thought I'd failed. But EOS had marked me. The memory of that rhythm, the way the world breathed through Panther, that weird pulse when I approached it. It stayed with me. And maybe, just maybe... That was the point.

Prism didn't send me here for answers.

She sent me here to remember.